How best to leave the world of work behind

‘Art, science, sport, hobbies, tidying up after ourselves, mowing the lawn – all these activities, paid or not, prosaic or profound, we cover with the blanket term “work”,’ writes Peter Ostrowski.
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Andy Beckett’s long read was elucidating and possibly prescient (Post-work: is the job finished?, 19 January). However, it’s not just a matter of whether workers can survive having the time and freedom of post-work but also how to manage the transition from one to the other. As a retiree of almost 70, most of my friends and I fill our days with meaningful activity alongside pleasurable family and leisure time. Nonetheless, some of them found it hard to make the switch.

Fortunately the health service allowed me to cut down my job to half-time working at first, and this helped the process of letting go. Then, when leaving the NHS, I was fortunate to still have a private practice for a further six years, for which some of my friends envied me. They told me of the near trauma of stopping work being like falling off a cliff before they found new roles with which to challenge themselves and utilise their talents.

Maybe what’s needed is a greater use of and tolerance towards job-sharing, in the private as well as the public sectors, where there is strong evidence that people are more productive when engaged in a range of purposeful activities. These can include mentoring the next generation of workers, in trying to achieve a viable work-life balance that suits each individual’s needs, as well as society’s.Ya’ir Z KleinLondon

• A striking omission exists in Andy Beckett’s analysis of a post-work world, which also neatly illustrates the parallel universes that women and men often appear to inhabit. For years, ever since the 1980s when women again began to flood into the workplace, pioneers such as Anna Coote, Tess Gill and Harriet Harman have argued that part-time work, flexibility and job shares to fit around family commitments (and the high cost of childcare) shouldn’t have to mean that a woman forfeits aspirations and a career. So far, employers, in the main, have proved resistant.

Again, in 2011, in Future Work, Alison Maitland and Peter Thomson demonstrated how in the corporate world a much-reduced working week and flexibility is healthier, more sustainable and as profitable as an addiction to work. Yet, workaholism rules. If Beckett had drawn on more women’s experiences, the extent of the battle against workaholism might have been better illustrated. If part-time work, now more than ever, too often means low pay and zero-hours contracts in a dead-end job with no career ladder, what real chance does post-work have? Yvonne RobertsLondon

• Andy Beckett’s wonderful essay hit most of the essential issues in the discussion: the maldistribution of work, the culture and psychology of work, the radical political implications of workers with time on their hands, and the gendered nature of work and work resistance (though he was a little thin in that department). He missed one crucial consequence of reducing work, which is also a driving reason to move towards work reduction as quickly as possible, namely the ecological brink of collapse that the earth teeters on. To pull back from that abyss, we must drastically reduce the planet’s level of material production, as well as change the way work is accomplished and redistribute the wealth that production creates. That means slashing the amount of work the globe’s population does. Anything less will push Earth over the edge, if it hasn’t toppled already.Eva-Maria SwidlerFaculty Goddard College, Vermont, US, Author of Radical Leisure

• A problem when talking about human activity is that we have just the one word – “work” – to name several distinct types of endeavour. For example, Andy Beckett’s article itself, an essay that gave its author satisfaction and contributed to our culture, was exchanged for an income on publication. Yet this work is fundamentally different from the type of labour that no one aspires to, yet still provides an income. Art, science, sport, hobbies, tidying up after ourselves, mowing the lawn – all these activities, paid or not, prosaic or profound, we cover with the blanket term “work”. We do lots of different things; reaching for the stars cannot have the same name as that which destroys us.Peter OstrowskiWickford, Essex

• The radical thinkers imagining a world without work might have time on a Friday to read a 5,000-word article, but some of us have jobs to do that most certainly won’t be finished otherwise. Georgina HollowayLondon